No one particularly expected E. O. Wilson to answer the question. It would have been tantamount to answering, once and for all, what the “x” in algebra really was.

Instead, the renowned evolutionary biologist’s talk at the Harvard Humanist Hub—entitled “The Meaning of Human Existence”—tried to answer a related and similarly important question. Namely: why do we, the altruistic, cooperative, and purportedly enlightened homo sapiens, seem to be so royally “fu[dg]ing” up the Earth?

There may be few people better equipped to answer that question than Edward. O. Wilson. His work on evolutionary biology earned him the moniker “Darwin II,” courtesy of writer Tom Wolfe. He has received two Pulitzers and is the man who coined the terms “biodiversity” and “biogeography.” To boot, Wilson is considered the world’s leading authority on ants. And having spent so much time with species other than our own, Wilson may just have enough intellectual distance to assess us fairly.

The appearance of homo sapiens, according to Wilson, runs something like this: “After many close calls, extraordinary suffering, [and nearly reaching extinction on the African savannah], we staggered onto the stage, to the grief of most of the rest of life.”

Since then, one Promethean achievement after another has brought us basic machines, mathematics, AC and DC currents, Fords, PCs, iPhones, increasing our power and our numbers. But while our computers run ever more advanced operating systems, Wilson says we continue to run on “Paleolithic emotions” while our society runs on “medieval institutions.” And although we like to think of ourselves as the dominant species on the planet, Wilson makes the argument that if we count “dominance” in terms of numbers, global biomass, and our odds of survival as a species, ants may have us beat.

Our dominance on Earth, and maybe even our mere survival, may depend less on our technological achievements than on whether altruism of selfishness wins out in our species.

Wilson argues, as Darwin himself first proposed, that altruism is not God-given but a development of natural selection. There are various examples—upwards of twenty different evolutionary lines, says Wilson—of biological altruism that have been identified in the natural world. (Altruism being defined as an organism acting to the benefit of other organisms at a cost to itself.)

Examples include vampire bats who regurgitate blood so those bats who failed to feed that night won’t starve; ‘helper’ birds that will aid in raising the young of other mating pairs; Vervet monkeys that will raise alarm calls when predators approach, even though they attract attention to themselves; and social insects like ants that rely on countless sterile workers who sacrifice their lives and reproductive potential for the survival of the colony.

Among evolutionary biologists, the idea that altruistic tendencies are derived by natural selection is not controversial. But exactly how biological altruism developed is a subject of ongoing debate.*

Wilson’s stance on the issue, put simply, is that altruism develops when there are different groups within a species—different tribes for example—that are in competition with one another. If there are selfish individuals within a group—even a single selfish member—then the selfish members will always win out over the altruists. However, groups of altruists will theoretically always out-perform groups of selfish individuals because altruism insures the group as a whole is more likely to survive.

However, whether biological altruism can be extrapolated as a direct cause of human altruism is still a subject of debate. For one thing, biological altruism and what’s commonly meant by human altruism are not identical, since the latter requires conscious intent and the former does not.

Furthermore, human behavior—more than any other animal’s—depends on culture, which is itself environmentally dependent. We’ve managed to spread across the globe, surviving in drastically different climates and on vastly different diets, not by rapidly evolving our anatomy (our genetic differences are superficial) but by endlessly adapting our culture. Humanity’s specific brand of altruism may be a unique product of cultural evolution.

By and large our altruism does resemble that of other animals. For example, we are far more altruistic towards our kin then towards strangers. And like birds, humans will help raise others’ young, or even adopt children who have no biological ties to themselves. But human altruism doesn’t always fall neatly in accordance to patterns of biological altruism. For example, humans often collaborate with and even give their lives for non-genetically related families and even “other tribes.” Stranger still: we act altruistically for the sake of other, non-symbiotic species.

But given our unique altruistic capacities why does it seem we’ve become so bad for the Earth? Why, as Wilson asked, are we screwing things up?

It’s tempting to fall into existential guilt or think of ourselves as some kind of perverse aberration inherently destructive to life on planet Earth. But we shouldn’t be so hard on ourselves. As answer for our behavior seems to lie in the very basic mechanisms of life.

We have been raised by Earth’s own code of conduct. Like other creatures, what’s first and foremost on our minds is an old and basic formula: survive and reproduce. Food and shelter, sex and kids. Much of what we and other animals do are focused on these basics ends and we strive for them as best we can.

Consider the rabbit or the starling. These species are not inherently evil, but when they’re placed in ecosystems with no natural predators and seemingly limitless resources, they do what life does best: consume and reproduce, ad infinitum, to the detriment—and sometimes extinction—of plants and animals around them. As a species we have come to a similar sort of place.

We’re not exactly a blessing for the Earth, but to be fair, we’re also not a plague. We’re a decidedly mixed bag. Our cultural adaptability has allowed us to stumble into, survive in, and disrupt ecosystems the world over. But we’ve also developed the capacity for arguably the highest form of altruistic action: altruism towards other species.

Once in a while a person like Wilson comes along to remind us just how strange, how tribal, how animal, how stomach-driven, sex-driven, and Paleolithically myopic we are. But at the same time—by simply existing at all—people like Wilson also manage to make a case for precisely the contrary.

_____

*For those who want to enter into the fray see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on biological altruism.

An earlier version of this article first appeared on the Humanist Hub website on Sep 17, 2017.

Well, I’m glad he veered off, because hewing strictly to the original title would result in a single sentence. “There is none.” We, like the ant, are products of millions of years of evolutionary flailing about. There’s no “meaning” in that. It just is. The hand we were dealt.

His question is much more interesting. Although I’m not sure I quite buy into all of the evo-psych stuff, you can watch monkeys at the zoo behaving altruistically.

Priya Lynn

“It’s tempting to fall into existential guilt or think of ourselves as
some kind of perverse aberration inherently destructive to life on
planet Earth. But we shouldn’t be so hard on ourselves”

The article hasn’t convinced me we shouldn’t be so hard on ourselves. I still think we are some kind of perverse aberration inherently destructive to life on planet earth.

“We’re not exactly a blessing for the Earth, but to be fair, we’re also not a plague.”

That’s overly optimistic. Scientists say we are in the midst of on of the great extinction events due to humans effect on the environment comparable to the number of species made extinct when the meteorite crashed into the earth killing the dinosaurs. The overwhelming evidence is that we are a plague upon the earth.

Kevin K

Sadly, I’m inclined to agree with you.

Of course, if we kill ourselves off, the planet will get along just fine. The shrew or the raccoon or the raven will replace us as the “smartest” species.

Priya, Kevin, thanks for your thoughts! — I think you’re right in your concern. Humanity has proven itself a huge liability for other life on Earth. But I’m willing to make the argument that humanity—while unique in its destructiveness— is actually a “natural” outgrowth of the circumstances of life on planet Earth.

All our tendencies towards survival, accumulation of food, of territory, of genetic propagation, are common to all forms of life on Earth. Through the use of things like tools, communication and the exchange of inter-generational knowledge we’ve managed to encroach on and endanger the balance of ecosystems in which we were formally just a small part.

But I’m inclined to think this isn’t all that different than what happens when a species becomes “invasive” — endangering and even driving to extinction other species around it. What’s different with humanity is the scale and intensity of our effect.

The risks are real, but so are our compunctions about our own “success” as a species. — People like you are evidence that humanity is self-aware of its destructive role. The question is: how much of our self-awareness and our adeptness at social-engineering can we leverage to actually safeguard the world from our own destructive impact?

However, whether biological altruism can be extrapolated as a direct cause of human altruism is still a subject of debate. For one thing, biological altruism and what’s commonly meant by human altruism are not identical, since the latter requires conscious intent and the former does not.

Furthermore, human behavior—more than any other animal’s—depends on culture, which is itself environmentally dependent. We’ve managed to spread across the globe, surviving in drastically different climates and on vastly different diets, not by rapidly evolving our anatomy (our genetic differences are superficial) but by endlessly adapting our culture. Humanity’s specific brand of altruism may be a unique product of cultural evolution.

I have to agree with Stephen Jay Gould that biological and cultural evolution are extremely different, and any attempt to map Darwinian logic onto cultural phenomena is usually an exercise in fact-free storytelling. We simply don’t know enough about the culture of our Stone Age ancestors to make anything but speculative pronouncements on the selective pressures they faced within their societies and how they are reflected in our genetic, cognitive, and cultural legacy.

There’s no use pretending that these selectionist stories are free of cultural prejudices, either. Elaine Morgan described in The Descent of Woman how our understanding of early human evolution is based more on bias than evidence. Our culture is infatuated with the hunter-warrior mythology Morgan calls “The Tarzan Myth,” so all the traits we assume arose in ancient male humans, such as erect posture and manual dexterity, derive from the need to hunt and fight. Meanwhile, the traits we assume arose in ancient female humans, like breast size and hairless body, we attribute solely to their value for the delectation of the male. This sexist Panglossianism is no more scientific than anything Ken Ham or his ilk could come up with, but prominent anthropologists push it with a straight face.

Jim X

I would be interested on Professor Wilson’s take on whether modern American Republicanism represents an evolutionary genetic defect or simply an inbred disease? Either way is humorous since Republicans and Christians don’t “believe” in evolution, even though they gladly guzzle dinosaur juice (oil).

More than 30 hypotheses have been proposed for the development of bipedalism. Fighting/tool use seems to be a minority view — tool use did not occur until several million years after bipedalism among our distant ancestors. Frankly, the fighting one seems far-fetched to me — our closest living ancestors do just fine with their teeth.

The article promotes the “wading” hypothesis, but covers a wide range of others.

ThaneOfDrones

Scientists say we are in the midst of on of the great extinction events
due to humans effect on the environment comparable to the number of
species made extinct when the meteorite crashed into the earth killing
the dinosaurs.

Relatively mild then. The K/T extinction was nothing in comparison to the Permian/Triassic (aka the Great Dying)

ThaneOfDrones

Some things about Edward O. Wilson:

He was indeed a leading expert on ants. But then he tried to cast a wider and wider net, seeing everything as ants. His book Sociobiology was very poorly received.

E.O. Wilson’s group biology view of altruism, promoted together with David Sloan Wilson, has not been well-received within the evolutionary biology community.

E.O. Wilson, despite making many list of “top N atheists” is not an atheist. He has described himself as a provisional deist

ThaneOfDrones

More than 30 hypotheses have been proposed for the development of bipedalism in humans.

Bipedalism has been around a lot longer than us. No one seems to think tool use was a big factor in the rise of allosaurs, tyrranosaurs or ratites.

kraut2

We’re not exactly a blessing for the Earth, but to be fair, we’re also not a plague.

: how much of our self-awareness and our adeptness at social-engineering can we leverage to actually safeguard the world from our own destructive impact?

None at all as long as the preferred way of production through the capitalist model persists to which accumulation of capital and the unlimited exploitation of resources at the cheapest cost are necessary. Capitalism has no and never will have any concerns about anything else but production at the cheapest cost to sales with the maximum profits, and any talk about reforming it is just nonsense like reforming feudalism.
The only solution is to break the system and come to a planned societally controlled production tat takes into account all the environmental impacts of production and the overall benefits to society.
If you think this is socialism – then yes, it is.If you think with this current model there will be any changes, then you really fell for the “corporate greening” talk.

Even the drive to “electric vehicles” leading to depletion of water sources in the areas where lithium is produced is nothing but an attempt to shift profitable production to another model, certainly not to help the environment when looking at the footprint at production and resource extraction.

The continuance of the present system of production will become moot as will any talks of personal freedom when environmental catastrophes will hit – no doubt about that – disrupting our present system severely and leading to massive losses of lives. The signs are all there and we are NOT prepared at all.